Your headline (Creative writing tests limit creativity, Sats review finds, 24 June) would be funny except for the fact that, presuming Lord Bew's review is correct, it is the creativity of 600,000 youngsters each year that is being suppressed. And this nearly 20 years after Sats started. The government still can't get it right. Teachers, their unions, the Commons select committee, academics and many public figures have called for an end to the external testing, league-table feeding, national curriculum tests, while stressing the importance of assessments made by classroom teachers as a tool of effective teaching. No doubt business leaders who worry about the need for innovators for the industry of the future agree.
Is it just the tabloid press and the firms which do the testing that want Sats to continue? Judging by the chart of the "upper echelons of Whitehall" (24 June), the 35 senior posts in the Education Standards Directorate could be reduced if Michael Gove has the courage to end this ridiculous, damaging and expensive external testing of young children.
Emeritus Professor Michael Bassey
Newark, Nottinghamshire
? Lord Bew has come up with the idea of a test for 10- and 11-year-olds which will include assessing them for "grammar". Will he tell us which of the many models of "grammar" this will be? How it will be tested? What kinds of work this will require teachers to teach? Will it penalise non-native and regional dialect speakers? Will any of these answers take on board the fact that for over 30 years of postwar examining of "grammar" and "composition" (ie the writing of continuous prose) in the old O-level exams, no correlation was ever found between the scores in these two areas? In other words, there was no evidence that teaching grammar to young people actually helps them write better. In my experience, most 10- and 11-year-olds find that the abstract quality of grammar is as meaningful as calculus ? that's to say, a tiny minority "get" some of it, and the majority just recite the useless lies we tell them about verbs being "doing" words and the like.
Unless these issues are debated, Lord Bew's statement is hollow, and the curriculum will be skewed to teach this stuff, while children, teachers and parents will go on being harassed by it all.
Michael Rosen
London
? How can the proposed test reforms possibly prevent "teaching to the test"? The maths and reading tests will remain, and won't reduce the undue amount of test preparation devoted to them. The "secretarial" test of spelling, grammar, punctuation and vocabulary is eminently suited to excessive preparation.
Professor Colin Richards
Spark Bridge, Cumbria
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/jun/24/sats-review-lord-bew-grammar
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